Disempowering democracy

Abstract

All major agencies intervening in community-based and carbon forestry – such as international development agencies, conservation institutions, and national governments – state that their interventions must engage local participation in decision making. All say they aim to represent local people in the design and implementation of their interventions. In practice, decision-making processes are rarely ‘free’, barely ‘prior’, poorly ‘informative’, and seldom seek any form of democratic ‘consent’ or even ‘consultation’. Through case studies of representation processes in forestry programs in the Congo Basin region, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda, this chapter shows how forestry interventions weaken local democracy. We show that participatory and ‘free, prior and informed consent’ processes rarely reflect local needs and aspirations, are rarely democratic, and do not permit participants to make significant decisions – such as whether or how the project will take place. The intervening agents’ choices of local partners are based on expedience, naïve notions of who can speak for local people, and anti-government and pro-market ideologies informed by a comfort with expert rule. Although elected local governments are present in all cases in our study, they are systematically circumvented. Instead, project committees, non-governmental organisations, customary authorities, and local forestry department offices are recognised as representatives, and technical project objectives are favoured over democratic representation.